NY court eyes liability for man's STD disclosure at Guthrie Clinic

Tuesday

Nov 12, 2013 at 6:40 PM

The Associated Press

While he's identified only as John Doe in court papers, a man's treatment for a sexually transmitted disease was revealed by a nurse at an upstate New York medical facility to someone who knew his real name — his girlfriend, who also happened to be the nurse's sister-in-law.
Now he's urging New York's top court to find he has a right to sue Guthrie Clinic Steuben in Corning for the 2010 violation of his privacy rights. The clinic fired the nurse within days, as its president promptly advised him in a letter.
Arguing Tuesday at the Court of Appeals, attorney T. Andrew Brown said the judges have a history of setting precedents, and it's time they did it again to protect patients' privacy in the face of changing technology and health care practices. "If those folks have their records disclosed, there's no remedy at all," he said.
Brown said his client's life was ruined by the disclosure, costing his relationship, straining other friendships and causing him to move. While New York common law allows suing a doctor for an unauthorized disclosure of patient information, the switch to electronic medical records accessible also to physician assistants, nurses and even receptionists means it can be shared with the world with the push of a button, he said.
Medical corporations need to be held strictly liable for those breaches, giving them the incentive to stop them and impose protocols where they can be halted, Brown said. The federal patient privacy law also doesn't provide patients with any remedies either, while data show there have been many violations, although medical personnel have been fired. "They get terminated, but it doesn't help the patient," he said.
A federal judge dismissed Doe's lawsuit, concluding the clinic wasn't liable for the nurse's actions outside her duties. A federal appeals court asked the New York judges to clarify the issue under state law.
Martha Stolley, attorney for the clinic, said no other state or federal courts have found medical corporations strictly liable for such unauthorized disclosures. She argued that the New York judges shouldn't allow it for unforeseeable events like this, by a nurse who wasn't even involved in the patient's treatment, which violated Guthrie's own policies.
"The medical corporations are already incentivized to have measures in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening," Stolley said. The federal law sets the standard for patient privacy and gives the corporations another incentive, she said.
There are instances when employees disclose information in the course of their duties, for example by hitting the wrong computer key, where a clinic could be sued for information wrongly disclosed, Stolley said. In the case at hand, the information wasn't widely distributed but only texted by the nurse to one other person, she said.